Engineering & Construction
The team designs and builds a structure that has to hold.
What it looks like
A video says in thirty seconds what a page explains in a thousand words: how loud it gets, how much laughing there is, what the hands are doing.
What it is
Teams design, build and test a structure with limited time, materials and budget: a catapult, a bridge, a tower, a machine. The materials are simple and, where we can, recyclable: pasta, cardboard, wood, rope. No technical skill is needed. The teams often start designing before they know what they’ll be given, so the plan has to survive contact with the actual box of parts.
Depending on the material, the format takes a different name: Pasta Building, the Leonardo Challenge, the Catapult or Lego. It runs indoors or outdoors, anywhere from a ballroom to tables on a lawn, and we deliver it in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Building… the group
Construction as a metaphor for the company
Construction team building comes out of a need every company has: dealing with problems and challenges that keep being new ones.
Working out a strategy against a problem nobody saw coming can decide whether a company succeeds or doesn’t, and having a team that has practised doing it matters more than it sounds.
So here’s the idea underneath the format: plan, design and deliver a small construction project with limited time and limited resources. It’s a genuinely appealing challenge, and it asks for a decent amount of creativity, adaptability, teamwork and shared values. The object built can stand for the company, for one of its products, or for its mission and values, and the path from the first sketch on paper to the final presentation is the path of a real project.
Simplicity in the service of team building
This format has the advantage of fitting any venue and being simple to organise, with materials that are easy to find and easy to handle. It doesn’t need long either, and a session that still gets somewhere can run in an hour, on a limited budget, without costing anything in effect on the team. Engineering is just as flexible about what you want to concentrate on. Leadership and communication? Vision and company philosophy? Creativity as the thing that decides whether the group succeeds? Whatever the priority is, we design the format around it.
A format with a light footprint
Construction is a flexible format in almost every respect. It can run indoors or outdoors; no engineering knowledge is needed from anybody. The materials are all simple, everyday and preferably recyclable, in line with our low-impact approach: pasta, cardboard, wood, rope, recycled plastic. Depending on the main material, the format becomes Pasta Building, the Leonardo Challenge, the Catapult or Lego Team Building. The catapult version ends with a launch test, where distance and accuracy settle it, and the pasta version ends with each team presenting its tower and explaining how it got there. Prizes go to the tallest, the most innovative, the most solid or the best collaboration, depending on what the day is meant to reward. It fits as a break between sessions of a conference and equally as a full training day. The day after, the team has seen what happens to a plan when the materials turn out to be different from the ones it counted on.
Social Constructions
When what surfaces deserves an afterwards
An activity surfaces a great deal about how a team communicates, decides and works together, and sometimes what surfaces deserves more time, more depth and a method. That is where a Team Coaching path can begin: a different road, to be taken only if it is needed, to turn what the day made visible into a new way of working together.
Discover Team Coaching →
Let’s talk about your next team building
You don’t need to have picked a format yet. Tell us what you want your team to take home, how many of you there are and where you’ll be, and we’ll do the rest: within 24 hours you get a considered proposal for your case, with the formats that hold up against your numbers, and what each one leaves the team the day after.
Prefer to talk? +971 50 795 9666 · info @ teambuildingincentive.ae